Disk drive capacities increasing

The increase in disk drive capacities

In 2014 we are now using 4TB capacity disk drives with 5TB arriving in the coming months. So if we have a 16 bay chassis this can now hold 80TB! Within the next year 8TB and 10TB drives will arrive, the issue with these increased capacities is how to back it up and more importantly restore.

The choices available are as follows:

Backup continuously using disk to disk or disk to tape solutions.

Backup daily using the above methodology.

Create a clustered storage solution.

Use asynchronous replication to replicate the data to another site.

Use a data deduplication system to reduce the amount of data being backed up and replicated.

I have no problem with using a combination of the above to ensure data is protected and we can assist with these solutions.

My issue is that we continue to accumulate data at an unabated rate and the storage systems this data sits on become more critical to maintaining control of your data. Some questions you should ask of your current storage system.

Do you have redundant RAID controllers?

Are the RAID controllers software or hardware?

Can I create snapshots?

Can I synchronise / replicate volumes?

Can the system provide thin provisioning?

Can I cluster my storage?

Is my data adequately backed up?

What provision do I have for data growth?

What type of drives do I have in my storage enterprise or desktop?

When was the last time you performed a restart from power down?

How old is my current storage platform and should I be looking at something else?

Is this storage critical to the business?

What RAID level do I have on my storage?

Do I have hot spares allocated?

Is my storage protected by a UPS?

Is my storage on a JBOD (just a bunch of disks) or is it a RAID?

What service level for support do I have?

Do I have a battery backup?

Can I move some of this data to an archive or cold storage?

Summary

As I mentioned with these increased data volumes and size of disk drives increasing losing these huge volumes of data is more important today than ever before. If you need advice call us and we’ll see what we can do.